ManageEngine announced that it is strengthening its endpoint management offering by bringing Patch Manager Plus to the cloud. The automated patch management solution for Windows and third-party applications is available immediately. Patch Manager Plus on Cloud enables admins to automate the entire patch management process, from patch detection to deployment, without any infrastructure investment, thereby securing devices from multiple vulnerabilities and cyberattacks at less than a dollar per computer per month.

Market Scenario

According to CCIPS (Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section), an average of 4,000+ ransomware attacks have happened every day since 2016. Many victims of ransomware, such as Wannacry and Petya, have admitted that their failure to react and patch their business critical computers/servers on time have made them fall prey. Though there are many reasons for cyberattacks, CCIPS strongly suggests an automated and centralized patch management system as an effective prevention and response action that can significantly mitigate the risk posed to organizations due to cyberattacks.

Driving Factors

Growing mobile workforce in a data sensitive world emphasizes the need for automation and cloud-based solutions, and proactive prevention measures to safeguard organizations from cyberattacks as the operational line between personal and corporate is fast diminishing. Early in 2017, Gartner stated that the year-on-year growth of cloud application service (SaaS) offerings would increase by 20 percent that year, predicting that the market share for cloud computing would continue to increase as well. This prediction indicates that many businesses today are moving their critical servers to the cloud, allowing them to strategize their business continuity planning more effectively and continue to operate without worrying about their infrastructure.

Addressing this trend, ManageEngine’s new Patch Manager Plus on Cloud is designed to instantly procure, test and approve patches before deployment for Windows and over 850 third party applications automatically. The cloud solution also will run a health check every 90 minutes and generate a report on any vulnerable machines for that hour, thereby keeping the systems robust round the clock and cyberattacks at bay.

Automated Patch Management from the Cloud

The cloud version of Patch Manager Plus reduces the time and effort needed to deploy patches among the growing workforce on time thereby keeping the zero-day exploits and other vulnerabilities at bay. It also allows IT teams to remotely patch their servers, desktops, laptops, and virtual machines from anywhere in the world by quickly creating an account and installing agents remotely.

● Constantly scans the network to identify the health status from a single UI
● Automatically detect, download and deploy the missing patches
● Granularly controls patch deployment process, with advanced capabilities like waking up computers for deployment and rebooting them if required
● Provides periodic notifications and out-of-box reports, including patch enforcement and patch compliance reports

Pricing and Availability

The cloud version of Patch Manager Plus is available immediately. Pricing starts at $34.5/ month for 50 computers ($0.69 per computer). A fully functional, 30-day trial is also available at https://tinyurl.com/yap9gukp. The free edition of the product also is available for startups and small businesses to manage up to 25 computers/servers.